"Dyspeptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bewail the laws of Nature, and doubt a future readjustment, because of stomachs chronically out of order. An eminent author with a weak digestion wrote to me recently animadverting on what he calls Browning's insanity of optimism: it required no personal acquaintanceship to discern the dyspeptic well-spring of this utterance. All this may be admitted lightly without carrying the physiological argument to extremes. A man may have a liberal hope for himself and for humanity, although his dinner be habitually a martyrdom. After all, we are only dictated to by ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... of baths at different degrees of temperature, best determined in each case by the physician under whose advice, as a general rule, they should be used. The water is highly beneficial in cutaneous diseases, inflamed eyes, etc. If the person is dyspeptic the non-gaseous water should be used in small doses. It may be as well to add that such waters should not be used if there is a tendency to cerebral disease, or in cases of ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... nevertheless one of the least happy of little boys, and one of the least happy of young men. He was born with an uncomfortable and awkward and unwieldy character, as some men are born lame, or scrofulous, or dyspeptic. The child of a father over sixty, and of a very young mother; there was in him some indefinable imperfection of nature, some jar of character, or some great want, some original sin of mental constitution, which made him different from other men, disabled him from getting pleasure or ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... November afternoon. I had just consummated an unusually hearty dinner, of which the dyspeptic truffe formed not the least important item, and was sitting alone in the dining-room with my feet upon the fender and at my elbow a small table which I had rolled up to the fire, and upon which were some apologies for dessert, with ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... such parents would be selected; if the young animals were to be of prime quality, he must know it long enough beforehand, and be particular in his choice. This is plain speaking, but true,—as everybody knows, who studies the laws of life. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Given a half-starved dyspeptic and a bloodless negative blonde as parents, Hercules or Apollo is an impossibility in their progeny. Yet people look with infinite expectations of health, strength, beauty, intellect, as the product of $0 times {-1}$. The late Colonel Jaques, of the "Ten Hills Farm," knew ever so much better;—what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... to find his employer's son already installed in the cubicle, writing by the light of gas, as the shutters were not removed. Edwin had finished and stamped his first love-letter just as his father entered the cubicle. Owing to dyspeptic accidents Darius had not set foot in the cubicle since it had been sanctified by Hilda. Edwin, leaving it, glanced at the old man's back and thought disdainfully: "Ah! You little know, you rhinoceros, that less than two days ago, she and I, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the usual American breakfast, a sullen, dyspeptic gathering of persons who only the night before had rejoiced in each other's society. With him it was the time when the mind is, or ought to be, at its best, the body at its freshest and hungriest. Discussions of the latest plays and novels, the doings and undoings of statesmen, laughter and ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... delights of her new friend's garden. But from that day, among other changes which began about this time, the child's cup and plate were well filled, and the dread of adding to her own sufferings seemed to curb the dyspeptic's voracious appetite. "A cheild was amang them takin' notes," and every one involuntarily dreaded those clear eyes and that frank tongue, so innocently observing and criticising all that went on. Cicely had already been reminded of a neglected duty by Rosy's reading ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... his friend; "we are now in the presence of that stimulating element which provides patriotic Britons with music-hall songs, and dyspeptic Britons with ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... Venus. It is exciting, but not scientific. It suggests charity children gorging themselves with plum- pudding, rather than poetic natures drunken with beauty; and fragrance, swooning 'neath the sweetness of a duet sung by their own chaste souls. The dyspeptic who cannot recover by following my prescription deserves to die. The pessimist whom it doesn't make look at life through rose- tinted glasses, should be excluded from human society. The hypochondriac whom it doesn't help ought to be hanged. There is not a human ill—unless it be hypocrisy— ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... becomes poisonous. I am a great patron of tea; the poet truly says, 'It cheers, but not inebriates.' It has sometimes a singular effect upon my nerves; it makes me whistle—so people tell me; I am not conscious of it. Sometimes, too, it has a dyspeptic effect. I find it does not do to take it too hot; we English drink our liquors too hot. It is not a French failing; no, indeed. In France, that is, in the country, you get nothing for breakfast but acid wine and grapes; this is the other extreme, and has before now affected me awfully. ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... of the world,—to understand them, as few men did, by his poet's soul,—through love, or color, or music, or keen healthy pain. Very many openings for him to know God through the mask of matter. He had shut them; being a Calvinist, and a dyspeptic, (Dyspepsia is twin-tempter with Satan, you know,) sold his God-given birthright, like Esau, for a hungry, bitter mess of man's doctrine. He came to loathe the world, the abode of sin; loathed himself, the chief of sinners; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... imagination was borrowed finery, his fancy tinsel, and his invention the world's well-worn jewels; that whatever in his verse was poetic was not new, and what was new was not poetic; that he was only an unworldly dyspeptic, living amid many books, and laboriously delving for a lifetime between musty covers, picking out now and then another's gems and bits of ore, and fashioning them into ill-compacted mosaics, which he wrongly called his own. To ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... to-night," remarked Mr. Elliott as he and Dr. Hillhouse moved across the room. "A little dyspeptic, maybe, and so inclined to look on the dark side of things. She has little cause, I should think, to be anxious for her own son or husband. I never saw Mr. Whitford the worse for wine; and as for Ellis, his earnest purpose in life, ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... of French sleeves and collars Ever sent out from Paris, worth thousands of dollars, And all as to style most recherche and rare, The want of which leaves her with nothing to wear, And renders her life so drear and dyspeptic That she's quite a recluse, and almost a skeptic, For she touchingly says that this sort of grief Can not find in Religion the slightest relief, And Philosophy has not a maxim to spare For the victims of such ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... or the most dyspeptic of after-dinner dreams, could not be more bewildering than was this motley train of the Lord of Misrule. Giants and dwarfs, dragons and griffins, hobby-horses and goblins, Robin Hood and the Grand Turk, bears and boars and fantastic ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... me tell you something, Dick," the secretary answered, firmly. "Don't you work off all your dyspeptic ideas in this neighborhood. My Senator is a great man. They can't appreciate him up here because he's honest—crystal clear. I used to think I knew what a decent citizen, a real man, ought to be, but he's taught me some new things. He'll teach them all ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... farinaceous mixture. With us the cup of coffee is valued by its clearness. We generally drink it with sugar and milk. The French with their meals use it as we do,—but after dinner, invariably without milk (cafe noir). And we would suggest to the nervous and the dyspeptic, who do not want to resign the luxury of coffee, or to whom its effects as an arrester of metamorphosis are beneficial, that when drunk on a full stomach its effects upon the nerves are much less felt than when taken fasting or with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... you could. All fear is bookish talk Cooked up by writers out of literature, To give the shudder to dyspeptic girls. Dying is easy. Come along, my friend! A glass of port shall cure us of such fears; Moments like this make ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... before a crowd of complete strangers eating their food; or, as if seized with an uncontrollable craving for the dance, you fling out after the joint for one wild gallop in an outer room, from which you return, perspiring and dyspeptic, to the consumption of an ice-pudding, before dashing forth to the final orgy at a picture-gallery, where the walls are appropriately covered with pictures of barbaric women dressed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... the heavens: it was a bright and glorious morning in spite of the intense cold, and the amount of oxygen we inhaled was enough to elevate the spirits of the most dyspeptic of mankind. Presently, after descending a slight declivity, our Jehu turned sharply to the right; then came a scramble and a succession of jolts and jerks as we slid down a steep bank, and we found ourselves on what appeared to be a broad high-road. Here ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... and, to make the thing more ridiculous, the dwarf and the giant were marching side by side; the knock-kneed by the side of the bow-legged; the driven-in by the side of the drawn-out; the pale and sallow dyspeptic, who looked like Alex. Stephens, and who seemed to have just been taken out of a chimney that smoked very badly, and whose diet was goobers and sweet potatoes, was placed beside the three hundred-pounder, who was dressed up to kill, and whose looks seemed ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... a pretty kettle of fish they make of it between them. Did I not say, when I was arranging that affair of Faust's, that all Man's reason has done for him is to make him beastlier than any beast. One splendid body is worth the brains of a hundred dyspeptic, flatulent philosophers. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... strictest regimen, and eat alone. Talk and laughter help the digestion, and are indispensable in affections of the liver. I have no doubt, sir, that it was my patient's agreeable society that tended to restore to health his dyspeptic relative, Mr. Sharpe Currie." ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... chickens, hams and tongues, the imported sausages and fish, the jelly-inclosed paste of chicken livers, the bottles and jars of pickled or spiced meats and vegetables and fruits. The spectacle was adroitly arranged to move the hungry to yearning, the filled to regret, and the dyspeptic to rage and remorse. And behind the show-window lay a shop whose shelves, counters and floor were clean as toil could make and keep them, and whose air was saturated with ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... uncivilize us. If we do live in a new country, we want to learn a few of the barbarous arts of riding, driving, walking, hunting, &c. It's a pity, too, that our young men, instead of being hale, hearty fellows, such as you have at the English universities, are generally a thin, hollow-chested, dyspeptic, consumptive-looking set—children at twenty, and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... day from their arrival, the whole company, as fine and healthy a body of men as one could wish to see, were invited to dinner by this sinful man, and, after spending the whole of the next twenty-four hours in bed, left the town a broken and dyspeptic crew; the parish doctor, who had attended them, giving it as his opinion that it was doubtful if they would, any of them, be fit ...
— Told After Supper • Jerome K. Jerome
... these philosophers lay in going every Saturday night, when work was done, to Chaseborough, a decayed market-town two or three miles distant; and, returning in the small hours of the next morning, to spend Sunday in sleeping off the dyspeptic effects of the curious compounds sold to them as beer by the monopolizers of the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... hitched up tandem and driven at breakneck speed. A runaway in an American farmer's wagon over a corduroy road but feebly suggests the miseries of travel in a Chinese cart. It may be good for a dyspeptic, but it is about the most uncomfortable conveyance that the ingenuity of man has yet devised. The unhappy passenger is hurled against the wooden top and sides and is so jolted and bumped that, as the small boy said in his composition, "his heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... feelings. We lie on soft beds, sit near the radiator on a cold day, eat cherry pie, and devote our attention to one of the opposite sex, not because we have reasoned out that it is the right thing to do, but because it feels right. No one but a dyspeptic chooses his diet from a chart. Our feelings dictate what we shall eat and generally how we shall act. Man is a feeling animal, hence the public speaker's ability to arouse men to action depends almost wholly on his ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... weighted down with dazzling jewels from head to foot. Then everything became clear enough to my memory; I was the king, and these idiotic creatures fawning and cringing about me were my obedient subjects; my slaves; the willing tools which kept me in power. A gouty feeling in my feet, a dyspeptic ache of the stomach and an alcoholic pain in the head, caused me to be in a very disagreeable mood, and I felt like kicking the entire gathering ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... nobleman, pausing before the portrait of a gentleman who had fallen at Marston Moor. "Oh, yes, we are vanishing. After a while the great breed of English gentlemen will be as extinct as the dodo. And this house will be turned into a Dispensary for Dyspeptic Proletarians, or more probably an American named Cohen will buy it and explain to his guests at dinner just ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... to win heaven by denying earth; the beauty disease, which would make of poesy a conventional flower-garden. He brings heroic remedies for our morbid sex-consciousness, and for all the pathological conditions brought about by our excess of refinement, and the dyspeptic depletions of our indoor artificial lives. Whitman withstood the aesthetic temptation, as Amiel calls it, to which most of our poets fall a victim,—the lust for the merely beautiful, the epicureanism of the literary faculties. We ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... appreciate, yet no will power can ever provide good nutrition out of a diet against which taste constantly rebels. Consciousness of the digestive organs is an offense to them. The more a man is conscious of his stomach, the less will be its capacity for performing good service; therefore, a dyspeptic should never attempt to follow a course of experimental dietetics with himself, for if he watches his stomach after his carefully selected meal, to see how it will serve him, he will always find abnormal symptoms. It is never wise to expect anything but good results from anything which has been allowed ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... beautiful and harmonious. Men live mainly in their bodily sensations. Such living, though apparently real, is a false sense of life. There is a profound significance in the scriptural injunction, "Take no thought for your body." The dyspeptic thinks of his stomach, and the more he has it in mind the more abnormally sensitive it becomes. The sound man has no knowledge of such an organ, except as a matter of theory. The body, when watched, petted, and idolized, soon assumes the character ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... was dyspeptic, and suffered from gnawing hunger in the morning. The second smiled broadly, a smile that made two vertical folds on his shaven cheeks. And I smiled, too, but I was not exactly amused. In that man, whose name ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... troubles, and by exercising an intelligent will, can generally prevent their recurrence. If one finds himself in the morning in a state of languor and lassitude, be sure he has abused some physical function, and apply a remedy. An invalid will make a poorly equipped librarian. How can a dyspeptic who dwells in the darkness of a disease, be a guiding light to the multitudes who beset him every hour? There are few callings demanding as much mental and physical soundness and alertness as the care of a ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... since he married an attractive little widow with a snug property. I had him pardoned, you may remember, among my first acts as Prime Minister. Prison life seemed to have agreed with him. He had lost his dyspeptic air." ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... trifle more digestible, however. A healthy person would not notice this, the digestive power in health being more than is necessary for the ordinary meal; but the dyspeptic will soon find that mutton gives his stomach less work. Its composition is very nearly the same as that of beef; and both when cooked, either by roasting or boiling, lose about a third of their substance, and come to us ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... A dyspeptic, worn with work and anxieties, his nervous system shattered, Garcia was subject to fits of petulance which were ludicrous. In these rages he called everybody who would bear it pigs, dogs, and other more unsavory nicknames. Coronado ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... body with liniments and salves; give him these PILLS to purify his blood; they may not cure him, for, alas! there are cases which no mortal power can reach; but mark, he walks with crutches now, and now he walks alone; they have cured him. Give them to the lean, sour, haggard dyspeptic, whose gnawing stomach has long ago eaten every smile from his face and every muscle from his body. See his appetite return, and with it his health; see the new man. See her that was radiant with health and loveliness bloated and too early withering ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... English, Froude was a bachelor who idealized Mrs. Carlyle and who regarded as the simple truth an old man's bitter regrets over opportunities neglected to make his wife happier. Everyone who has studied Carlyle's life knows that he was dogmatic, dyspeptic, irritable, and given to sharp speech even against those he loved the best. But over against these failings must be placed his tenderness, his unfaltering affection, his self-denial, his ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... the ball when they dropped it in their game. So Saturday came, and both were rather the worse for so much idleness, since daily duties and studies are the wholesome bread which feeds the mind better than the dyspeptic plum-cake of sensational reading, or the unsubstantial bon-bons of ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... saying that they would call Le Sa to drink them up. In cases of sickness the patient went and weeded some piece of bush land as an offering to Le Sa; and the consequence was often a wonderful cure to the indolent dyspeptic! ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... was at his case, and silence reigned. The overseer—a dyspeptic, long-haired man, who looked like a dejected tragedian—interviewed the new-comer, supplied him with a certain amount of 'copy,' and left him to his devices. Mr. Warr worked by his side. That gentleman ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... advised him to take a 'little wine,' but he didn't advise him to take many quarts of beer, or numerous glasses of brandy and water, or oceans of Old Tom, or to get daily fuddled on the poisons which are sold by many publicans under these names. Still less did Paul advise poor dyspeptic Timothy to become his own medical man and prescribe all these medicines to himself, whenever he felt inclined for them. Yes, there are the old and the feeble and the diseased, who may, (observe I don't say who do, for I am not a doctor, but who may), ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... drawing-room that evening, and had there been introduced to his hostess, had been a sort of revelation to the languid, fashionable guests assembled; sudden quick whispers were exchanged—surprised glances,—how unlike he was to the general type of the nervous, fagged, dyspeptic ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of this dilemma to my future leisure. With a little trouble we made out to examine the papers without Bartleby, though at every page or two, Turkey deferentially dropped his opinion that this proceeding was quite out of the common; while Nippers, twitching in his chair with a dyspeptic nervousness, ground out between his set teeth occasional hissing maledictions against the stubborn oaf behind the screen. And for his (Nippers') part, this was the first and the last time he would do ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville
... whose concave ear the tides Murmur what the main confides Of his compass'd treacheries! What of Carlo? Did the breeze Madden to a gale while he, Curl'd and cushion'd cosily, Mixed in dreams its angry breathings With the tinkle of the tea-things In his mistress' cabin laid? —Nor dyspeptic, nor dismay'd, Drowning in a gentle snore All the menace of the shore Thunder'd from the surf a-lee. Near and nearer horribly,— Scamper of affrighted feet, Voices cursing sail and sheet, While the tall ship shook in irons— All the peril that environs Vessels 'twixt the wind and rock Clawing—driving? ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lunch waiting for them that would have made a dyspeptic hungry, and they attacked it in a workmanlike manner that drew an ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... the choir and the difficulties with the choir-boys and the necessity for repairing the organ, about the troubles with the churchwardens, especially one Mr. Bellows, who, in his cantankerous and dyspeptic objections to everything that any one proposed, became quite a lively figure to Maggie's imagination, about the St. John's Brotherhood which had been formed to keep the "lads" out of the public-houses and was doing so well, about the Shakespeare Reading Society and a Mrs. ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... aliment with which they nourish the perversity of their preconceptions. Second-hand Jerry did not say these things to our young philosopher; for had he done so, Khalid, now become edacious, would not have experienced those dyspeptic pangs which almost crushed the soul-fetus in him. For we are told that he is as sedulous in attending these atheistic lectures as he is in flocking with his fellow citizens to hear and cheer the idols of the stump. Once he took Shakib to the Temple of Atheism, but ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... active principle "menthol" contained in the plant, and which may be extracted from it as a camphoraceous oil, possesses in a marked degree antiseptic and sedative properties which are chemically hostile to putrescence, and preventive of dyspeptic fermentation. ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... small man, but he wore the dignity of a senator, and he possessed a pride of that intense and fastidious sort which is rarely encountered outside the oldest Southern families. He was thin, with the delicate, bird-like mannerisms of a dyspeptic, and although he was nearing fifty he cultivated all the airs and graces of beardless youth. His feet were small and highly arched, his hands were sensitive and colorless. He was an authority on art, he dabbled in music, and he had once been a lavish entertainer—that was ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... four hours after each meal, or from nine to twelve hours a day. As a matter of fact the digestive function is much more often the occasion of conscious discomfort, than is the function of ovulation. Whenever it becomes so, the dyspeptic approaches the condition of the reptiles or ruminating animals, in whom the process of digestion so absorbs the powers of the nervous system that all other modes of its activity are suspended. But such a condition is universally regarded as an evidence of disease, nor could any considerations ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... knew more of dietetics there would not be so many dyspeptic stomachs and weak nerves and inactive livers among children. If parents knew more of physiology there would not be so many curved spines and cramped chests and inflamed throats and diseased lungs as ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... strange, then that smokers and chewers have a thousand ailments? that German physicians attribute one half of the deaths among the young men of that country to tobacco? that the French Polytechnic Institute had to prohibit its use on account of its effects on the mind? that men grow dyspeptic, hypochondriac, insane, delirious from ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... felled an ox, but were nerveless in turning an honest penny, and for that restless mind hungering for occupation, and with the digestion of an ostrich for dice and debauch, riot and fraud, but queasy as an exhausted dyspeptic at the reception of one innocent amusement, one honourable toil. But while that woman still schemes how to rescue from hulks or halter that execrable man, who shall say that he is without a chance? A chance he has: WHAT ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Fish-Friers' man keeps clearing his throat and beginning, "The position is this—"; and the Private Secretary keeps saying in a cold dispassionate voice, "Are you going to the Lord Mayor's lunch?" or "How much will you give to the Dyspeptic Postmen's Association?" or "What about ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... whole, be not too severe on poor Voltaire! He is very fidgety, noisy; something of a pickthank, of a wheedler; but, above all, he is scorbutic, dyspeptic; hag-ridden, as soul seldom was; and (in his oblique way) APPEALS to Friedrich and us,—not in vain. And, in short, we perceive, after the First Act of the Piece, beginning in preternatural radiances, ending ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... is as useless and oppressive as undigested food; and as in the dyspeptic patient the appetite for food often grows with the inability to digest it, so in the unthinking patient an overweening desire to know often accompanies the inability to know to any purpose. Thought is to the brain what gastric juice is to the stomach,—a solvent to reduce ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... numerous sycophantic houses. The Duchess of Monmouth had a residence here, with the delightful John Gay as secretary. Can one imagine a modern Duchess with a modern poet as secretary? The same house was later occupied by the gouty dyspeptic Smollett, who wrote all his books at the top of his bad temper. Then came—but one could fill an entire volume with nothing but a list of the goodly ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke |
